


Lion on Summer Street

by stereomer



Category: Panic At The Disco
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-03-02
Updated: 2012-03-02
Packaged: 2017-11-01 00:05:34
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,225
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/349797
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/stereomer/pseuds/stereomer
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>A story about steampunk inventors!</p>
            </blockquote>





	Lion on Summer Street

The house on the hill looks the same as always. Flying buttresses, pillars, enormous windows, and a sandy red roof, all of which look pristine from this distance and create the illusion that they’re staring up at a painting in the horizon. (‘They’ meaning the crowd that always gathers in the gap of time between the end of the school day and supper, when the dust staining Brendon’s breeches has reached new heights and kicking a tin can around has lost its entertainment value.)

A younger boy gives a final, decisive kick to the empty can that had once housed moldy peaches. He spits on the ground, scowls, and nods at the house in indication as he says, “Old man Smith lives up there.”

“Smith  _does_  sound like a name belonging to an old man,” Brendon muses out loud without taking his eyes off the house. 

“I’ve always heard it was old man Ross,” someone else says. 

Yet another boy pitches in. “I’ve always heard that it was haunted.”

Then they all continue watching in silence. In any case, neither old man Smith-Ross nor any ghosts have ever been seen. The house does do some strange things sometimes, like belching out clouds of smoke, or having every window blazing with oil lamps for days in a row. Sometimes even the very foundations shake, with dust blooming out and the house settling down again a few inches from its original position. Very, very strange. 

But Brendon relishes it; after all, it is of his opinion that every city needs a mystery, and this house is theirs. 

 

*

 

The next day, Brendon goes to school and sleeps with his head in his arms through his morning lessons, except for math. He actually enjoys math, and goes so far as to study it at home, looking up equations and formulas from borrowed books. As a child, he’d discovered the satisfaction of flicking through the beads of an abacus, the impossibly quick  _clack-clack-clack_  as he counted numbers in his head. But after math, it’s back to sleep until the teacher raps on her desk with a ruler and dismisses the class.

He bicycles back to a little shady patch at the base of the hill, dropping his mode of transportation carelessly to the ground so that the handlebars bang against hard dirt. Then he sits under the tree, opens his assigned homework, and stares up at the house after each word he reads. It makes for a bad average reading time, but at least he gets to indulge his imagination, which, after seventeen years, still has yet to settle down into the calm cynicism that everyone else his age and older seems to drown themselves in. 

“What’s so damn interesting?”

The spitting boy from yesterday is frowning at Brendon, with the tips of his shoes almost touching the heels of Brendon’s outstretched feet. 

“Hello. Nothing. I mean, the house. I just like to look at it sometimes, without speculating about anything,” Brendon answers lightly, and the boy seems to take offense to this. His mouth turns down into an ugly sneer as he throws a glance at the top of the hill. 

“Yeah? Like you wanna live up there?”

Brendon has the feeling that he’s being led into something, but he says, “Sure.”

“Aw, bull,” the boy crows. “I bet you couldn’t spend ten minutes up there.”

And there it is – a challenge. As if smelling the formation of a bet, other boys and girls start to drift toward them, all gathering behind the invisible line between Brendon and the boy. 

Brendon should definitely not let himself get roped into these things. He knows all about how people goad each other until someone does something stupid. He is not going to fall for it.

“Ten minutes?” he repeats, standing up, and before he knows it, he’s taking off his jacket and throwing it to the ground for some odd reason. It just seems like an action fitting his words. “I’d gladly spend half the day there.”

The boy’s eyes narrow shrewdly. “But you won’t stay overnight. All right, no matter. Half the day. I doubt the ghosts need a whole night to drive you insane or suck out your eyeballs from your head.”

“Yeah!” someone chimes in from the back. 

“Eyes!” someone else bellows.

Brendon feels sick. Suck out his  _eyes_  from his  _head_? He tries to imagine how that might happen. Several older boys are now scuffling around with stiff steps, lolling their tongues out and making groaning noises, which Brendon supposes are fairly accurate representations of what he’ll look like once he’s rendered eyeless by rabid ghosts. 

“Well.” The boy crosses his arms and nods toward the house. “Go on, then.”

“ _Now_?” Brendon asks before he can help himself. He hastily tries to amend it to sound less afraid. “Now I will go, you’re right. Yes.”

He picks his jacket and bag up and tucks them under his arm as he slowly pushes the gate open with his other hand. The hinges have been rusted over for years, and he’s only able to open it just enough so that he can slip through sideways. It’s easy to keep moving, but hard to stop his knees from shaking a little. He refuses to look back, for he doesn’t want to give the crowd that satisfaction, and starts on the long road up. 

Everyone outside the gate has fallen silent; Brendon begins muttering curses under his breath with each step, aimed both at that stupid boy and at himself. Although people might think Brendon doesn’t know much and is often easily duped – he considers himself an easy believer, because that sounds better than being gullible – he knows enough that turning around and heading back isn’t an option. Not as long as he has eyes, anyway.

The house bobs closer and closer until Brendon, huffing and feeling his heartbeat in his head, pauses for breath where the incline flattens out and realizes just how sprawling the estate is. He turns and the entire city looks like it’s made of small wooden blocks, with clouds of dust everywhere. It’s a soothing sight, warm and familiar to Brendon’s eyes. 

In contrast, when he turns back, two gigantic double doors tower over him menacingly. With small, shuffling steps, he inches toward them until, with the just the barest brush of his fingertips, one of the doors creaks open.

Brendon stands there with his arm outstretched for a long time. Long enough for his muscles to grow heavy from sluggish blood flow, and maybe even long enough for the angle of sunlight cutting into the house to change slightly. It widens into a bright expanse of yellow as Brendon finally pushes the door open all the way, illuminating high-floating dust motes, large black and white floor tiles, and cathedral ceilings.

“Hello?” he calls, dropping his bag and jacket onto the ground. The only response he gets is the echo of his own voice. 

He waits for another chunk of time, and then something about the vast empty space seems to override his fear and, without giving much thought to it at all, his foot lifts up and crosses the threshold of the doorway. As soon as it touches down on the edge of a glossy black floor tile, a hole opens up in its place and Brendon, despite trying desperately to regain his balance, teeters on the ball of his other foot before pitching forward into the dark. 

He somehow lands on his back a split second later.  _Trapdoor_ , he thinks breathlessly as he stares up at the opening above him, where from this angle, he can still see the front door and the last of the sunlight streaming in as the sun itself dips further west. 

Suddenly, the light gets blocked out as something leans over him. Brendon almost chokes on his own saliva and tries to spider himself backward using only his fingertips, elbows, and ankles. His vision betrays him just by doing its job as it adjusts to the darkness and he sees that a steel face is staring down at him, with brass coins for eyes and a seam of empty space for a mouth. Its head is shaped like an oversized can of pickles. 

“ _Chhhh_ ,” it says in a muffled voice.

“Jumping jackrabbits,” Brendon says, and he faints. 

 

*

 

There’s an unhappy stirring in Brendon’s stomach. It feels like an entire turbulent ocean is sloshing around in there. Thankfully, he manages to wake up and hurl himself to the side before a particularly angry wave travels up his throat and he vomits whatever he ate that morning. 

“How much did you give him?” a voice asks in astonishment. 

“Only about one squirt just up near the nostrils,” another voice answers, much calmer and closer in proximity. 

Brendon sits up and pops his eyes open. He finds that he’s in a large room, and that he’s lying in a bed, and that two boys are staring back at him, one by the door and one sitting on the edge of the mattress. They seem relatively solid – or, at least, more solid than ghosts should be. 

“Smelling salts,” explains the boy standing by the door, “in the loosest sense. One day, Ryan got the impulse to try and create the smelliest, most offensive mixture he could.”

Brendon considers his situation. The only thing he can think to ask is, “What’s in it?”

“Lots of stuff,” Ryan says grandly, but with little inflection. “Several moles of methyl mercaptan. Um, the inside soles of Spencer’s old shoes, grout from under his toenails – ”

“His own pillowcase from the days when he took regular sabbaticals from bathing himself,” Spencer interrupts. His eyes wrinkle, so Brendon assumes he’s smiling. It’s hard to tell, since the lower region of Spencer’s face looks like the hide of a bear. Ryan’s, however, looks like a time-battered, balding porcupine whose spikes are few and far between. 

Despite the differences in facial hair between all three of them, Brendon guesses that they are barely old enough to be out of school, if that. He absently touches his own chin, trying to gauge their ages by comparing and contrasting. 

Ryan lays a hand on Brendon’s leg. His fingers are knobbly and stained with oil. “Let me know if you start getting memory lapses or find that you can’t breathe.” 

He pats twice, then rises from the bed and ambles out of the room. Brendon looks after him, open-mouthed.

“He’s just watching out for potential side effects of the smelling salts,” Spencer reassures. “I wouldn’t worry about it. He always comes up with about five chapbooks full of potential side effects, and most of them make no sense.”

“He made them? Smelling salts? Is that – what happens up here?” Brendon stumbles over the question.

Spencer makes a face, like he just got a whiff of his own toenail grout. “Well, kind of. Maybe, not really. Not smelling salts particularly, at least. We – ”

Before he can get any further, the door bangs open with what Brendon initially thinks is some phantom blast, an angry ghost finally coming to suck out his eyes, but there are quick scuffling noises and then something jumps onto his lap and starts squirming around, making squeaky sounds akin to an old mattress. 

“Oops.” Spencer winces. 

“A dog,” Brendon states disbelievingly. 

“Roscoe,” Spencer says after an uncertain pause. “One of, uh, our more successful ventures.”

Roscoe is still wiggling around, lying on his back and scuffing his paws in the air. He is also, apparently, made of metal. All kinds of metal – brass, silver, nickel, rusted-over iron. He has welding plates as shoulder blades, and joints screwed together with hex nuts, bolts, and washers. He blinks with tiny creaks of his eyelids; the panting sounds real enough, if a little like an un-oiled hinge. The very tip of his tail is made of a wooden cone, a sharpened pencil without the graphite.

Brendon hesitantly pets Roscoe’s stomach, muting the rattling of his ribs each time he makes contact. Roscoe sighs happily, then hacks up a handful of springs onto the bedspread. 

Brendon stops petting. “Uh.”

“Ongoing problem,” Spencer dismisses, having seemingly relaxed a bit. “Trying to fix him is like taking apart a pocketwatch and putting it back together. Always some pieces left over and nothing gets fixed. Anyway, I’m glad you know now. Telling the truth was easier than I thought.”

He smiles again and strides out of the room before Brendon can correct him by saying, no, actually, he  _doesn’t_  know now. Brendon shuts his mouth and takes another look around the room instead. It appears he’s on the second floor, or maybe the third, and the bed is one of two pieces of furniture, the other being a roll-top desk shoved into the corner adjacent to the door. There are no curtains on the windows, and Brendon is able to see the sunset. It's nice. Spencer and Ryan also seem nice. 

Judging upon all these factors, it certainly doesn’t seem like a house that’s haunted or otherwise occupied by angry people. As he’s pondering these things, one side of the bed springs up with an almost comic  _booooing_  sound, and the next thing Brendon knows, he’s airborne, being pitched bodily toward the window. 

“Ah!” he shouts, and then the windowpane slides up out of the way and he sails through it. 

“Ack!” he yelps, and then an inflatable slide of some sort explodes out of the window-sill like a tongue and catches him with a slight bounce before buoying him down to the ground. Brendon sprawls onto the dirt rather ungracefully as the slide rolls back up into itself posthaste.

“Goodbye! We trust in your discretion!” calls Ryan’s voice from inside the room as Brendon is still blinking with slow drags of his eyelids, supremely disoriented and more than a little shocked. 

He lies there, getting dirt in his nose. The house had  _burped him out_. 

With that realization, there’s nothing else to do but stand up, brush off his clothing, and pick up his belongings, which are still sitting by the doors. He starts shakily on the journey down. 

 

*

 

Of course Brendon comes back the next day.

“You’re inventors!” Brendon calls up when he’s once again lying flat on his back after having fallen through the trapdoor. “You invent all kinds of gadgets up here! That’s why such strange things happen sometimes, and you cultivated the rumors of the house being haunted because you didn’t want anyone to come around to visit! Maybe because you were afraid of being taken advantage of! Maybe you just wanted to be left alone!” 

His triumphant words are followed by a silence. “I won’t tell anyone,” Brendon adds honestly.

Spencer’s head immediately pokes into view from up above. He looks down at Brendon, all ten fingers curling around the edge of the trapdoor.

“For the record, we thought people would laugh at us,” Spencer says. “Did you come back just to announce that you had figured this all out?”

“I want to work for you,” Brendon says. “For a fee of two-hundred dollars a week, accounting for any and all overtime accrued, which would be my going rate multiplied by the tangential slope of a circle with radius equal to four point four at x-coordinate eighteen, y-coordinate one, and multiplied again by the integral of the function ‘f’ of ‘2a’, ‘a’ being the hours worked, in an interval of negative two and seven, but of course excluding holidays and time spent napping, all divided by sine of pi.” 

The result of which would be a nonexistent number, or zero. Brendon had figured it a better idea to come off as initially boastful rather than say why he was really here – because he was lonely, because he was tired of kicking cans down dirt roads, because somehow these two people had fallen into Brendon’s life – or he into theirs, to be precise – and he found himself inexplicably wanting to hold on before they fell back out again. 

Brendon holds his breath and watches Spencer silently mouth words to himself as a knot forms between his eyebrows. Now Ryan’s frowning face pops into view as well, on the opposite edge of the trapdoor as Spencer. 

“Sounds like a reasonable rate,” Spencer finally says. “But what would you do for work?”

“I’d be your accountant. I assume you buy your supplies?” Brendon asks, treading more carefully now. 

Ryan answers, “Yes, we have – I mean, someone left us a good amount of – I mean, yes.”

“I have an abacus,” Brendon offers. “I’m also excellent with plants. And tea-making.”

Spencer and Ryan raise their heads to look at each other; from down here, all Brendon can do is study the triangular jut of their chins and try to analyze the nuances of movement. He’s said enough. 

Spencer swallows once and cricks his jaw three times. Ryan’s Adam’s Apple bobs up and down twice. The only thing either of them says out loud is a thoughtful, “Hmm,” uttered by Ryan after Spencer’s second jaw crick.

Then they look back down at Brendon, who smiles at them hopefully.

 

*

 

Brendon finishes school for good a week later in a spectacularly dull ceremony wherein the students turn in their books, shake hands with the teacher, and shuffle home just like any other day. Then he promptly packs up his abacus and as many clothes as he can fit into his rucksack before announcing to his parents that he’s found employment and heading off to the Smith-Ross house. 

He steals up the hill when the roads are empty, thrashing through the brambles and trees on the south side for some cover, just in case. By the time he reaches the back doors, like Spencer had instructed him to, he’s covered in thorns and burrs and there are leaves in his hair. 

“Our accountant,” Spencer says doubtfully when he opens the door and sees the state of Brendon.

“None other,” Brendon replies, still a bit out of breath. 

And thus begins Brendon’s stay at the old Smith-Ross house. 

 

*

 

It’s easy work, and Spencer and Ryan seem to cotton on to the fact that Brendon doesn’t actually want to be paid to be there, save for in the form of food and shelter and the opportunity to watch any and all explosions (from a safe distance, and with goggles). Every once in a while, Brendon walks in to Ryan’s office and says something like, “Bad news. You're hemorrhaging money.”

“What an image, Brendon,” Ryan mutters while tinkering with the hind leg of what’s going to be Roscoe’s playmate. “I wish I were hemorrhaging money, because then I'd have a lot more of it to spend.”

“That's not what I meant. I meant – ”

“I know what you meant.” He looks up and smiles that strangely soothing smile that he has. “Thank you.”

Brendon will then wander away. At first, he tries keeping books on their spending by assigning a value to everything, which is maybe doable, but he doesn’t know the specific monetary worth of things like self-playing instruments, or Spencer’s toenail grout. It doesn’t really matter, anyway, whether they’re hemorrhaging money or not – Ryan’s father had left Ryan a considerable fortune, considerable enough that bookkeeping would just waste paper on which Ryan could write potential side effects of more foul-smelling salts. 

Mostly, Brendon plays with Roscoe and watches Spencer crash about eighteen versions of a hovercraft into the walls (because his math is off, but Brendon doesn’t have the heart to tell him this) and has trouble sleeping because the giddy feeling in his limbs refuses to leave, even after several months. He could dress up the emotion in melodrama and platitudes, but it boils down to this: he’s glad to be here. 

“I’m glad to be here,” Brendon tells Spencer after Spencer has crashed Flight Invention: Hovercraft v. 19.0 against the stove. 

“I’m glad too,” Spencer groans. “Could you please bandage my head?” 

 

*

 

A couple weeks after Spencer gives up hovercrafts and moves on to hoverboots, Ryan announces during lunch that someone from the Coalition of Inventors is supposed to be coming by for a couple days to assess whether they’re fit for membership. 

“Oh. That,” Spencer says flatly.

“Do you even want to?” Brendon asks after observing the pained looks on both Ryan and Spencer’s faces. 

“We used to, but they kept rejecting us,” Ryan sighs. “Oh well. I suppose we should at least make an effort.”

Brendon is imagining some old pretentious codger, but the person who actually shows up is young and looks supremely uncomfortable in his stiffly pressed suit. He keeps tugging as his collar and fiddling with his clipboard when Ryan brings him into the house. Ryan introduces him as Mr. Walker to Brendon and Spencer before heading upstairs to prepare their ‘showcase’. 

“Have you been here long?” Mr. Walker asks Brendon, once Spencer also excuses himself to the basement. 

“I’ve been working for them for a little while now. They have a metal dog that vomits up springs,” Brendon blurts out.

“Springs?” Mr. Walker repeats.

“Yes, springs.” Brendon brings his hands toward each other and then out again, back and forth like he’s playing an invisible bandoneon. “You know, with the coiling and the springing.”

“Oh yes, springs. All right.”

Brendon remembers he’s supposed to be making a good impression. Maybe Mr. Walker doesn’t find a spring-vomiting dog to be impressive. 

“Tea?” Brendon asks instead, and puts on water to boil without waiting for an answer. 

He’s just turned off the stove when an explosion sounds from the basement and rattles the floorboards. Brendon’s hand jumps a little, but he doesn’t drop the teapot. “I hope you like lemon tea,” he says loudly without looking over his shoulder as he pours from a great height, as if to distract Mr. Walker with the waterfall of hot water. 

Brendon is met with little success. When Mr. Walker speaks, he sounds scared and curious at the same time. “What in blue hell was  _that_?” 

Before Brendon can respond, Spencer emerges from the staircase. His entire face is blackened with soot, save for the whites of his eyes. A silent plume of smoke follows soon behind him. 

“Hello,” Spencer says, trying to act casual as his eyes dart to Mr. Walker. He does not succeed at this, namely because an enormous stream of smoke is still trailing into the room. Also, he smells distinctly like burnt hair.

“I was just showing Mr. Walker around,” Brendon says. He gives up the charade and puts down the teapot. 

Mr. Walker smiles. At least, it looks like a smile – the room is now filled with smoke and it’s sort of hard to tell if it’s a smile or a grimace. Brendon can see his teeth, anyway. All three of them stay like that, aiming vague smiles at the walls and the floor, until a wide berth of light cuts through the smoke. 

“The CODE’s going off,” Ryan calls. “You all better get out of there before you faint. I would only have time to drag two of you out of the house before it’d be too late.”

“CODE?” Mr. Walker asks as he grabs his things off the table and hugs them to his chest before hurrying after Spencer. 

“Carbonic Oxide Dectecting Entity,” Brendon answers as he brings up the rear. “Ryan often leaves the stove on, so it’s a fairly useful invention.”

Mr. Walker glances over his shoulder with interest. “Is it really an entity, then?”

“Well, it does have a jabbing mechanism, to wake you up should you ever faint from carbon monoxide poisoning. Unfortunately, we never got around to attaching wheels to it, so it’ll just be sitting up in the attic and jabbing at air at the moment.” Ryan sighs. He ushers the three of them out through the back door, then closes it behind him. 

Spencer stops and turns after about ten meters, and all four of them stand in a line, shading their eyes with their hands and squinting at the house. Up at the topmost window, Brendon can see a shadowy object protracting and retracting what looks like a broomstick. A hesitant knight in a joust. 

“There it goes now, with the jabbing,” Ryan says proudly. 

Mr. Walker writes something down on his clipboard.

 

*

 

When Brendon wakes up the next morning, he finds Mr. Walker’s door ajar and assumes that Mr. Walker must have left early. He also notices that something downstairs is giving off a sort of putrid smell, like a skunk. Today was Ryan’s day to make breakfast; maybe he had started in on another smelling-salt rampage instead. 

Except Brendon walks into the kitchen and is greeted with smoke clouds and the sight of Ryan and Mr. Walker sitting on Stock Invention #217/#218, which are chairs that are supposed to mold themselves to individual bodies. They’re still just regular chairs, though. Spencer hasn’t made the modifications yet. 

“What’s all this?” Brendon asks confusedly.

“We discovered a plant. Grows beyond the backyard, out.” Ryan flaps his hand back and forth, presumably indicating just how beyond. “Jon found it.”

Mr. Walker – Jon – nods. “I did. I did find it.” Then he hisses some laughter out through his nose; Ryan does the same. Brendon notices that Jon is wearing only his undershirt and a pair of Spencer’s old pants. His feet are bare.

“Listen, forget about this inventor coalition,” Jon advises. “They’re just a bunch of monocle-wearing old men who fly around in their hot air balloons and shout, ‘I say!’ to each other when they pass by. What you’ve got going here is much more interesting.”

“Yes, we should form our own coalition,” Ryan says fiercely. 

Jon taps his chin. “How about ‘The League of Useless Inventors’?”

“TLUI,” Ryan sounds out. “Sounds vaguely French. I like it.”

“You need at least four people to form a league,” Spencer points out as he emerges from the staircase leading to the basement while wearing his hoverboots. He doesn’t look the least bit surprised at the smoke, nor at the fact that Jon is wearing a pair of his pants, and just refills his teacup. 

“I agree.” Brendon nods. Over the soft hum of Spencer’s hoverboots, Brendon suggests, “How about ‘Patrons of Artistically Tangential Devices’?”

“That doesn’t even make sense,” Jon declares, but good-naturedly. 

“I’m just trying to make us sound better. Saying we’re useless is a bit harsh. I mean, Roscoe can fetch sticks,” Brendon says.

“PATD,” Ryan sounds out with a long ‘a’. “Sounds vaguely German. I like it.”

“Well, damn. Being foiled by a robotic dog doesn’t exactly make for my finest moment,” Jon sighs. 

“No, it doesn’t,” Ryan snorts. 

“But I can make up for that by cooking breakfast.”

Brendon sits up straight. He can’t remember when he’d sat down in the first place, because the smoke is making him feel light-headed and sleepily relaxed. “Can you really?”

“It’s the least I can do for patrons of artistically tangential devices.” Jon shrugs. 

He rises from his chair and starts to stumble and poke around the kitchen, eventually coming up with a loaf of bread and half a dozen eggs. As he’s cracking open the first egg, there’s a pop and a hiss from the other corner of the room and then Spencer lands back on the ground. Steam issues from the heels of his boots. 

“Balls,” Spencer says, looking disappointed. “Well, we tried. Perhaps we’ll see you next year, Mr. Walker?”

 

*

 

Jon has been with them for over a week.

“I like him,” Brendon tells Spencer. 

“He does know a lot about explosives,” Spencer agrees.

Brendon says, “Mm hmm,” and merely laughs when Spencer says, “What I’d like to know is how we gained two more people in this house in six months after almost two decades of no one even stepping through the gate.” Brendon tries to pick out any sign of bitterness, but Spencer had merely sounded mild, even genuinely curious. 

“A streak of good luck, maybe,” Brendon suggests. 

“Funny.” Spencer huffs out a smile, then shakes his hair out of his face as he tightens the final bolt with a grunt. “Okay,” he announces, sitting back on his heels, his eyes bright with exertion. “Try it.”

The hoverboots start emanating a yellow-ish glow as Brendon gets up and glides around the room. He’d re-done the math for Spencer, factoring in friction and aerodynamic factors. Now the boots continue to zip him around the room with no problem. 

“Well, look at that,” Spencer says as he watches Brendon. “We really might need to declare ourselves official inventors if our inventions keep working correctly like this.”

Brendon grins. “I like him,” he says again. 

Spencer starts packing up his tools. All he says is, “Ryan does, too.”

 

*

 

“It’s supposed to explode into  _something_ , but I forgot what it is,” Ryan had explained as they tromped out to the deserted grounds beyond the back of the house. 

When they're far enough away to avoid potential destruction on the house or any plant forms, Ryan places the object, a misshapen metal thing, in the center of the dirt-lot, and hands out goggles and aviator helmets made of soft leather to each of them.

After they've all put on their safety gear, Ryan advises, “Stand back,” and he lights the fuse. There are about seven seconds in which they all run frantically in different directions, and Brendon turns just in time to get a face full of a bright light and the ensuing explosion. 

When the wreckage settles and their hearing returns, Brendon can see that everyone is covered in a fine layer of beige dust, as if they're figurines that have been left out during a sandstorm. He can faintly hear Jon saying, "Good grief."

"That was unexpectedly loud," Ryan calls.

"At least everyone's still standing," Brendon calls back. He shucks his goggles off his face, squinting into the distance while trying to clean the lenses with his shirt. Mostly he just transfers dirt from his shirt onto his goggles.

“Did anything happen?” Spencer asks loudly. 

“Not likely,” Brendon shouts. He squints at Ryan’s Nameless Invention #1198, which looks as lumpy and nonfunctional as ever.

Ryan waves them all off. “No matter. We’ll just give it another try. Jon brought a fuse that he modified himself.”

“And the patrons go in for round two,” Brendon says. 

As they gather around the device to pack more gunpowder into all crevices and attach the new fuse, Spencer says, “You know, four people would constitute a league.” He concentrates on re-soldering wires and doesn’t look up. It’s obvious who he’s aiming the words at, and the other two stay silent.

“You think so?” Jon finally asks.

“I do,” Spencer answers. He snaps his goggles back onto his eyes and finally looks at Jon. When Brendon glances at Ryan, he sees that Ryan is smiling a tiny bit, and his shoulders seem straighter, set at an angle that’s somehow jauntier than usual. 

“All right then,” Jon says as he snaps his goggles on too. “Maybe we could be a league.” He smiles, then lights the fuse before anyone else can react, and all four of them scramble away while whooping loudly, with one hand clamped over their helmets.


End file.
